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Thursday, December 19, 2013

PS4 Review

It finally happened. As of two days ago, I got a Playstation 4 for Christmas. Well, kind of Christmas because I got it early and I'm paying for half of it, but whatever it is I now am in possession of Next-Gen. The console itself was thankfully not bricked out of box, if it was I would've gone ballistic. I have one game as of now, Call of Duty: Ghosts, the only launch title I really cared about. So far I've put in about 5 hours of play, and here are my initial thoughts.

The graphics are amazing. On a map called Prison Break in Ghosts, the light is so realistic that along a path there will be 70 or 80 streams of light that are shifting with the trees above it. The leaves all move individually and are intricately designed. Overall I'm extremely impressed with the graphics, even though Ghosts isn't the best-looking game out there right now. The speed is great as well. Even in times of slow internet connection, there is no lag on multiplayer (which is actually bad because I can't blame my high number of deaths on lag, so I have to accept that I don't know the maps). Even with graphically intense content, the overall performance is better than I've ever seen in a gaming console before. As far as the controller, the most sculpted controller I've ever seen, and I would say it rivals the feel of a $100 gaming mouse. As far as software goes, I'll be completely blunt, Playstation Plus sucks. It may have some decent features and free games, but realistically all I bought the $50 annual membership for was for multiplayer capability. I guess I was probably spoiled with the PS3, but really Sony, proprietorship like Microsoft? That's low.

Prison Break

As far as the titles available right now, like I said, I'm not interested in many of them. The only bundle I could get was with Kill Zone: Shadow Fall. From what I've read, I think I'll be selling this game in lieu of something that is sure to come out in the next 3 months when I start to tire of Ghosts. The number one thing that irks me about the launch titles is that GTA V isn't there. I know they would probably have had lower initial sales in September when it came out because a lot of people would have held out for PS4, but I really miss driving stolen Maserati's and driving on sidewalks without getting in trouble. Surely this will come out soon, but my hope was that it would happen before Christmas.

If you are thinking about going to Next-Gen, but are afraid of the early reports of failure and people saying to wait later, I would probably say just go ahead and buy one. Sure, in a couple years they're probably going to come out with a better one, but the existing one is awesome. I've had no hardware troubles, and with the capability that the hardware has, the games are going to just get better and better with each launch from developers. Thank you Sony for another great product.